Quotes About Philosophy

Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? What are you drinking? The water or the wave?

My Own Epitaph Life's a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once, and now I know it.

Life is a jest, and all things show it, I thought so once, and now I know it.

Life's a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once; but now I know it.

For the moment at least, we fall into that class of fishermen who fancy themselves to be poet/philosophers, and from that vantage point we manage to pull off one of the neatest tricks in all of sport: the fewer fish we catch the more superior we feel. -----

The good life is not found in dreams of progress,but in coping with tragic contingencies.We have been reared on religions and philosophies that deny the experience of tragedy.Can we imagine a life that is not founded on the consolations of action?Or are we too lax and coarse even to dream of living without them?

As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs' 'There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution' 'Human knowledge is one thing, human well-being is another.There is no predetermined harmony between the two' 'In the struggle for life, the taste for truth is a luxury-or else a disability

As commonly practiced, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs.

Over the past two hundred years philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error -the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.

Modern philosophies in which history is a process of human self-realization are therefore spin-offs from the mystical speculations of medieval theologians. When Hegel envisioned history as a rational process, he was able to do so because – like Plato and Plotinus – he believed the world was a manifestation of Logos.

When people say their goal in life is to be happy they are telling you they are miserable. Thinking of happiness as a project, they look for fulfillment at some future time. The present slips by, and anxiety creeps in. (…) so they turn to philosophy, and nowadays therapy, which offer relief from their unease.

if you don't think about death, you don't appreciate life.

He was not the nostalgic type. You live life today, not tomorrow, certainly not yesterday, he always said.

we no longer believe in God, but hope nevertheless for miracles—though

If I say: "I know that either it is raining or it is not raining," this is a tautology. It is the opposite of a contradiction, in that it is true whatever the circumstances, but it says nothing as it applies to nothing in particular.

The business of philosophy is critique. It clarifies the limits of meaningful language. Science on the other hand consists of all true propositions. It studies the existence or nonexistence of states of affairs.

The whole idea of "connections" between language and reality is a false one.

When we think language is on one side and reality is on the other, and then puzzle as to how they link up, we forget that we dwell in language and are merely imagining that we can point at them.

So, it is the spirit in which one acts that is vital, and the notion of language games clarifies this.

In his many remarks on mathematics, Wittgenstein is concerned to show the delusiveness of this picture. For when we reflect on it, we forget that we are looking at a projection of our own decisions and their consequences.

When told that there was to be the annual jamboree for academic philosophers in Cambridge in 1947, he said it was as if he had been told that there would be bubonic plague in Cambridge, and he would make sure he was in London — which he was!

But in 1946 Wittgenstein fell in love with Ben Richards, an undergraduate student of medicine at Cambridge who was nearly forty years younger than him; this relationship brought him great joy and continued until his death.

Now, ordinarily, when we say we know something, we can give compelling reasons for it. But when a philosopher says he knows he is holding his hand in front of him, he can give no reason that is as certain as the very thing it is meant to be a reason for. My having two hands is not less certain before I have looked at them than afterwards.

Wittgenstein was always interested in the nature of philosophy, and from the 1930s on he became clear that philosophy was a - a very ancient view of it, for Socrates and many ancient Greek philosophers practised it that way.